Category: Technology & Dev

Since we launched Illuminate back in May, our team has been working around the clock to develop even more features to help optimization teams better organize experiments, report performance and maximize impact. Today, we’re excited to share a few of these with you. What’s new in Illuminate? Show impact and determine priority Use our new Impact […]

Since we launched Illuminate back in May, our team has been working around the clock to develop even more features to help optimization teams better organize experiments, report performance and maximize impact. Today, we’re excited to share a few of these with you.

What’s new in Illuminate?

Show impact and determine priority

Use our new Impact Analysis to show the overall impact of your tests by page type and identify where you should be focusing your testing efforts.

Sort and filter by what matters most

Filter your tests by 15 attributes including target audience, page type, start and end date, KPIs, revenue impact and more. Not seeing what you need? Add your own using our new custom tagging feature.

Keep sight of the bigger picture

Our new dashboard view enables you to view your program’s overall performance or view performance by a specific team or line of business.

+ a new tiled layout

If you love a good masonry layout (á la Pinterest), then you’re going to love our updated experiment view. Easily switch between a basic list of your experiments or a super slick-looking tiled layout.

Many of these features were developed in response to feedback from our beta users, bringing more of Brooks Bell’s advanced experimentation methodologies directly into the software.

“With Illuminate, you’re not just getting another test repository,” said Suzi Tripp, Senior Director of Innovative Solutions at Brooks Bell. “You’re getting 15 years of experimentation expertise and proven frameworks to help you do more, and do it better.”

The promise of personalization is enticing: a complete 1-to-1 experience for every customer, driven by every detail and data point about that person: who they are, their interests, needs and history. Their customer experience is completely optimized to deliver the right content at the right time, influencing brand engagement, purchase activity and “wow”-worthy customer experiences. […]

The promise of personalization is enticing: a complete 1-to-1 experience for every customer, driven by every detail and data point about that person: who they are, their interests, needs and history. Their customer experience is completely optimized to deliver the right content at the right time, influencing brand engagement, purchase activity and “wow”-worthy customer experiences.

For years, this vision has been a pipedream among marketers, product managers and customer experience professionals. Many clients come to us wanting to “do personalization” but face significant challenges in doing so.

Part of this is due to the fact that “personalization” is so ill-defined.

At Brooks Bell, we define personalization as any experience that is delivered to a user based on known data about that person. By that definition, personalization exists on a spectrum: it can be one-to-few, one-to-many, or one-to-one. In the digital environment, product recommendations, customized search results and even segmented experiences are all considered examples of personalization.

But while many companies are already implementing these experiences, there’s still an overwhelming sense that many brands have yet to arrive in terms of personalization.

Got a bunch of burning questions about personalization? Submit them using the form below.

We’ll use this information to make sure we cover these topics in our upcoming posts.

This is because (not unlike experimentation) personalization is a business strategy that should evolve in order to deliver long-term value. And while it’s true that many brands already have the ability to do personalization, they’ve also found that elevating and scaling a personalization program is difficult, costly and, frankly, can feel pretty darn impossible.

So, how to do this? In addition to the fundamentals for a standard optimization program, there are three critical working components that need to be established for personalization:

Strategy: you need research and planning to purposefully and effectively launch, scale and benefit from personalization.

In the coming weeks, we’re going to break down personalization further by each of these components. We’ll outline the best practices, advice, strategies and tips to go from scrappy to smart when it comes to introducing and scaling personalization at your organization.

Here at Brooks Bell, we work with clients that are at varying stages of maturity when it comes to experimentation. Despite the differences in these partnerships, you might be surprised to learn that regardless of whether we’re working with a new or established testing program, they all face common enemies: pressure to deliver results; inefficient […]

Here at Brooks Bell, we work with clients that are at varying stages of maturity when it comes to experimentation. Despite the differences in these partnerships, you might be surprised to learn that regardless of whether we’re working with a new or established testing program, they all face common enemies: pressure to deliver results; inefficient processes; a lack of understanding and support for testing; and difficulty iterating on and applying learnings from test results.

Chances are that you’re tracking your website visitors en masse. You’re probably tracking acquisition sites, tallying up conversions and working to optimize your pages for the best success. But with all of that quantitative research, do you know about each individual user’s journey, and where they are struggling on your site? If not, you should […]

Chances are that you’re tracking your website visitors en masse. You’re probably tracking acquisition sites, tallying up conversions and working to optimize your pages for the best success. But with all of that quantitative research, do you know about each individual user’s journey, and where they are struggling on your site? If not, you should check out one of our partners: SessionCam.

Jonathan Hildebrand, Brooks Bell’s Sr. Director of UX & Design, spoke at SessionCam’s user conference last week in Chicago. If you’re unfamiliar with SessionCam, the company began with a mission of building the best session replay solution on the market. Over time the solution has grown into a fully-fledged behavioral analytics solution including heatmaps, conversion funnels, form analytics and more.

We’ve been blown away by the machine learning algorithms which identify signs of customer struggle and frustration on a website. We sat down with Jonathan to ask him for a couple takeaways from the event.

As a UX expert, what do you appreciate most about SessionCam?

Where SessionCam really shines is in the qualitative data it provides, which can uncover major hurdles on your site in ways that quantitative data could never reveal. SessionCam’s recordings allow customers to watch a complete play-by-play of a visitor’s experience on the site, whether it’s through a mobile device or desktop.

What about specific to testing?

From a testing perspective, SessionCam can be great for post-test analysis since it allows you to watch videos from the live test experiences. The Customer Struggle Score is also a great way to understand where problems are occurring.

Any interesting case studies?

Definitely. One that comes to mind is a retailer that has a buy online, pick up in store (BOPUS) program. They were using SessionCam to uncover the source of order mistakes. When there was an error at pickup, they would go back and watch that customer’s online session to see if a problem occurred during the online order process and determine if there were any improvements they could make.

And you only need to check out their website to see the kind of value that SessionCam has added to many of the world’s leading brands.

If you’re interested in finding out more about SessionCam, give us a shout.